The Mayor of Aihara: A Japanese Villager and His Community, 1865-1925

"The Mayor of Aihara brings to life in a concrete and accessible way key developments and processes affecting the Japanese countryside in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that a reader might encounter in general terms in a textbook on modern Japanese history. This work provides an unusually intimate and textured view of Japanese farmers and their changing world over an extended period of time, carefully setting the narrative in the context of larger trends in the social, political, and economic history of modern Japan. The result is a rich harvest of information on multiple dimensions of rural life from the perspective of an elite villager."--Steven J. Ericson, Dartmouth College